CentaurusComm

Status: Past project

Project Description:

It is well-known that TCP performs poorly in wireless a environment. This
project involves an empirical performance analysis of TCP on Cellular
Digital Packet Data (CDPD), Bluetooth and Wireless LAN (WLAN). This
analysis brings out the weaknesses of TCP in realistic conditions. We also
describe the design of CentaurusComm, a message based transport protocol
designed to perform well in low bandwidth networks and resource poor
devices. In particular, CentaurusComm is optimized to handle data
exchanges consisting of short message sizes. Typical mobile devices used
in the experiments included Palm Pilots. We show that TCP performance on
CDPD is very poor because of its low bandwidth and high latency.
CentaurusComm outperforms TCP on CDPD. We show that on Bluetooth, which
has higher bandwidth and lower latency than CDPD, both protocols perform
comparably. On WLAN, which has the highest bandwidth of all three
technologies, CentaurusComm performs comparably to TCP with a reduced
window size.

We are currently working on an improved version of CentaurusComm. We
propose to evaluate its performance on a reduced Bluetooth stack
consisting of only the minimum required layers.